My wife has dealt with this problem. I did some research and here's what I found.
Carbohydrates (and pretty much anything else addictive) are "crave-inducing" because of a physiological reaction they cause. It triggers chemicals in your body and brain, not at all unlike cigarettes or other drugs. For refined carbs, it's insulin in the blood, which is followed by serotonin in the brain. The serotonin creates a relaxing effect.
It would be easy to engineer any food to have this effect by adding some sort of drug to it. Sprinkle some heroin on broccoli and you'll probably start craving that pretty quickly. Obviously though, you don't want that. What you want is to have no craving at all.
There's a good chance that your brain is not producing enough serotonin without the carbohydrates. This could be due to a number of things, lack of sleep, exercise, or even sunlight, too much stress, chronic depression. Sadly eating carbs produces bursts of serotonin followed by a deficit, so it becomes a self-perpetuating cycle. Once some other factor gets you into the cycle, the carbs themselves will keep you there.
Assuming there aren't deeper factors at play, the following may help:
1. Don't eat any refined carbs for a month. Keep unrefined ones to a minimum as well.
2. Get exercise, sleep, and spend time outside where possible.
As for #1, it's much easier to accomplish this at the grocery store than at home. A Snickers bar is a lot less difficult to ignore on a shelf at the store than on a shelf in your pantry. Never go to the store when hungry.
All of this assumes that you don't have some deeper mental health issue at play. Overeating is often a method of self-sabotage employed by people who are depressed, in which case you may need professional help. But I'd at least try cutting out carbs first because it's free and can't really hurt.
Just to fill in a bit: "unrefined carbs" includes potatoes, rice, whole grain bread, corn, yams, turnips, beets, beans, etc. "Refined carbs" includes pasta, crackers, white breads (including sourdough and bagels), juice, non-diet soda, etc.
Another tip for surviving the store: shop the perimeter, stay out of the aisles. Make a weekly menu before you go to the store, keeping in mind what's in the perimeter and in the aisles. Your menu is your plan of attack.
Actually, it's different than that: you want to eat low glycemic index (GI) carbs, and avoid high GI carbs.
The reason why you get cravings is because you are eating high GI carbs. High GI carbs cause a lot of sugar to be released rapidly into your blood. Your body counterbalances this by releasing insulin, which causes a crash shortly afterward. Because now you have low blood sugar, you crave some high GI carbs to get a quick sugar rush again and the cycle just repeats, causing you to overeat and eat too many calories, gaining weight.
In order to break the cycle you must eat low GI carbs. This means avoiding potatoes, white rice, all soft breads (including whole grain wheat and white breads, if it's soft it's not good for you).
Good carbs are things like brown rice, sweet potatoes, whole grains such as steel cut oats, quinoa, amaranth, buckwheat (kasha), etc. These carbs are considered low GI because they have the whole grain intact and the husk of the grain takes a lot longer to digest, causing the sugar to be released slowly and steadily into your blood over a period of several hours.
If I eat a good bowl of steel-cut oats and some fruit in the morning (not instant oats, those have separated the husk from the grain), I get a steady release of energy all morning long. I don't get a quick rush and crash an hour later. It helps me focus as well.
Just follow these simple rules and you will eliminate cravings as well as eat healthier and lose weight naturally:
1. Only eat whole grains and low GI carbs.
2. Eat plenty of good fats like olive oil, avocadoes, nuts, etc.
3. Eat every few hours - don't wait from breakfast to lunch or lunch to dinner - your blood sugar gets too low. Eat a mid-morning snack - something like a small handful of nuts and a piece of fruit, and a mid-afternoon snack.
4. Don't eat late at night (after dinner and before bed).
Following those simple rules I lost 30 pounds, 10% body fat, and achieved my ideal weight without even doing much exercise (30 minutes of light cardio every other day, about 2.5 hrs a week).
Try it, the cravings will disappear soon, and you'll feel much better. You'll have constant energy all day long and you'll be able to focus on tasks like coding much better.
Granted, glycemic index is a useful measure. I don't recommend it, initially, only because I find most of my patients glaze over at that point. If you grok it, more power to you.
> husk of the grain takes a lot longer to digest
Well, most husks don't digest at all. That's "fiber", which is good for you for a whole different reason.
> your rules
Incompletely capture the conditions of your weight loss. How long have you kept it off? Married with kids? what are your work conditions? How do you commute? What climate do you live in?
> 30 minutes of light cardio every other day, about 2.5 hrs a week
2.5 / 0.5 = 5 days a week, but I get your point, it's that not hard, what's hard is doing it.
Sorry I meant 3.5 hours of exercise a week, not 2.5.
Married, no kids, commute 1 hour each way to work every day, work about 8 hours with occasional overtime. Live in the Northeast so cold winters, warm but brief summers.
I've kept it off for 1 year now and still manage to eat out once or twice a week - you don't have to follow the rules all the time. I also like to eat a lot during holidays.
I agree, but it's easier said than done. Living closer in a house in a non-ghetto neighborhood is going to cost me at least $600-700K or more and will probably lose value in the next few years due to deflation. Renting the same would cost me $3-4k/month. I'd rather live farther away and save the money.
I've been curious about this for a while: how would one cut out carbs? They're the most easily absorbable form of energy available. Without carbs you would have to bring in energy in the form of fats which can't be good in the long run.
You don't have to cut out carbohydrates; just REFINED carbohydrates.
Refined carbohydrates cause an unhealthy "spike" in blood insulin levels. It's the insulin drop that is felt as a "craving." The body "craves" an insulin spike.
And fats aren't bad for you. You need them to live. In general, your diet should be around 40/30/30 Carb/Fat/Protein.
There are tons of articles out there on how to eat properly but I've been paying a lot of attention to Robb Wolf lately. He has been getting some pretty impressive results with his recommendations.
As the others have posted, cutting out refined carbs is huge. But you should also avoid rice, potatos, and other "vegetables" that are essentially nothing but starch.
Carbohydrates (and pretty much anything else addictive) are "crave-inducing" because of a physiological reaction they cause. It triggers chemicals in your body and brain, not at all unlike cigarettes or other drugs. For refined carbs, it's insulin in the blood, which is followed by serotonin in the brain. The serotonin creates a relaxing effect.
It would be easy to engineer any food to have this effect by adding some sort of drug to it. Sprinkle some heroin on broccoli and you'll probably start craving that pretty quickly. Obviously though, you don't want that. What you want is to have no craving at all.
There's a good chance that your brain is not producing enough serotonin without the carbohydrates. This could be due to a number of things, lack of sleep, exercise, or even sunlight, too much stress, chronic depression. Sadly eating carbs produces bursts of serotonin followed by a deficit, so it becomes a self-perpetuating cycle. Once some other factor gets you into the cycle, the carbs themselves will keep you there.
Assuming there aren't deeper factors at play, the following may help:
1. Don't eat any refined carbs for a month. Keep unrefined ones to a minimum as well.
2. Get exercise, sleep, and spend time outside where possible.
As for #1, it's much easier to accomplish this at the grocery store than at home. A Snickers bar is a lot less difficult to ignore on a shelf at the store than on a shelf in your pantry. Never go to the store when hungry.
All of this assumes that you don't have some deeper mental health issue at play. Overeating is often a method of self-sabotage employed by people who are depressed, in which case you may need professional help. But I'd at least try cutting out carbs first because it's free and can't really hurt.